Reliving the Whitney Survey…150 years later

July 14, 1863: Bridgeport

[Today] we left Aurora, “dead broke.” We had much calculation over our funds, to see if we had enough to get our breakfast before starting, found that we had, and two dollars over, with which we start for a trip of 130 miles through the mountains. We had not traveled two miles before we met a tollgate, which took $1.25 of our store.

We came on twenty-eight miles, mostly over a very barren country with no feed, until we struck the meadows on one of the forks of Walker’s River—a pretty little basin, lying some 6,500 feet above the sea. Here we camped, and a relief it seemed to sleep in the open air. At Aurora, at our lodgings, one room was small, but it had twelve sleepers, in bunks, like berths on shipboard—here no such crowding.